“It’s not the new watch, but this week’s other big Apple news is that the Justice Department’s antitrust campaign is going about as well as the Russian winter did for Napoleon,” The Wall Street Journal editorializes. “On Tuesday the Second Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments about the roving prosecutor embedded inside Apple, and the three judges seemed skeptical.”

“Apple is working to evict Michael Bromwich from its Cupertino offices, where the lawyer has camped since federal district Judge Denise Cote ruled that Apple conspired with publishers to fix digital book prices,” WSJ writes. “Mr. Bromwich was installed over Apple’s opposition, and he took the appointment as an invitation to all but bug the Apple boardroom. Mr. Bromwich’s investigation with an unlimited mandate and budget has drifted well afield of antitrust into Apple’s business and corporate culture.”

“Mr. Bromwich’s quasi-prosecutorial operation exceeds the judicial power and has included abuses such as collaborating ex parte with Justice to serve a witness against Apple in an adversarial hearing. Judge Jesse Furman pressed DOJ’s lawyer Finnuala Tessier three times to concede that it would be ‘improper’ if a judge had behaved like Mr. Bromwich. She ducked the questions,” WSJ writes. “Ms. Tessier argued that the court lacks jurisdiction and should remand Apple’s protests about Mr. Bromwich back to Judge Cote. But in a vicious and biased cycle, every time Apple objects in Judge Cote’s court, she takes it as evidence of why the monitor is necessary. The Second Circuit can end this farce—and restore the proper limits of the judiciary—by instructing Mr. Bromwich and his team to pack up their Scooby Doo van.”

It’s easy enough to get by this one, but it’s understandable that people don’t know how. Copy and paste the URL into Google News, then click on the link from there. If MDN insists on linking to the WSJ, they could at least repeat these instructions, or just link directly to the Google News link.

Is that light I see at the end of the tunnel? It will be interesting to see the fallout, should the Federal Appeals Court end the Bromwich inquisition of Apple and find Judge Cote’s decision to be misguided and in error.

Unfortunately, a much more likely scenario is that the appeals court sends it back to Cote with specific details about how the appeals court believes she made mistakes and the specific elements of her rulings they want her to reconsider.

Unfortunately, it could go much like another Apple case where the appeals court sent it back to the lower court with specific instructions and the lower court basically said, “After reconsidering, I was right the first time and here’s why.” Now its back at the appeals court again.

While I hope there are definitive (and maybe even final) rulings out of the appeals court, I’m not counting on it.

Before people get too excited, the WSJ opinion page has long been outspoken against the DOJ’s prosecution of Apple in the eBooks case, so don’t take this opinion piece as evidence that Apple will soon be free of this parasite lawyer/monitor.

IMO, this entire DOJ action against apple was absolutely wrong from the beginning.

Just for the record, I’m a democrat who supports the recent Net Neutrality actions and many of the Administrations positions, but I’ve been totally opposed to the DOJ on this from the beginning.

(BTW, I’m not claiming that the DOJ’s position on this is a white house position, as it would always have been inappropriate for the white house to attempt to influence the DOJ.)

Many of my friends who are democrats feel the same way on this. Anti trust actions are supposed to be brought in SUPPORT of free trade. From the beginning, Amazon has been the near monopolist hear, and these actions have only helped to maintain that near monopoly.

I do believe this farce and miscarriage of completely misguided agenda-driven lefty justice will soon end. Judge Cote is clearly a dangerous ditzy nutbag delivering bizarre court interpretations that suggest a personal agenda than a fair one. If she was an archer she couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn either in terms of accurate judgments or aim. (BTW I’m no fan of any political party but disingenuous smarmy liberal thinkers who are judges or otherwise make me especially nauseous. Your mileage may vary.)

How it’s been allowed to go on this long without a major correction is anyone’s corrupted government slow courts guess.

I wasn’t excepting conservatives, but when liberals do it’s especially self-righteous, full of PC puffery and nauseating. I wouldn’t call those 47 Republican Senators smarmy so much as traitorous. You just don’t undermine a sitting President (as much as you night not like him or did not vote for him). We are the UNITED States Of America. Polarization too is it’s own dis-reward. We look like idiots to the world.

I laughed at what should have been an Onion article (but sadly was true) about the Iranian offer to broker peace between the President & the Republicans. Our founding forefathers are writhing in their graves.

Actually, the founding fathers are celebrating. Only Congress has the authority to lift or impose sanctions.

The President does not. The Senate wrote the letter when the President told them that he was not going to veto the bill to allow them to review the deal as it relates to sanctions – basically the bill was about reinforcing the constitutional checks and balances. The President has overstepped his constitutional authority with his position (as he has with many other things) and this was a partial righting of that ship.

The letter informed the parties of our country’s due process. Had Obama heeded the constitution in the first place, he would have opened the door for Congressional review as it relates to sanctions.